To add to Chuck’s comment, I’ve personally had a vehicle roll off a jackstand when the person helping me released the parking brake while we only had the front end lifted. Fortunately, I wasn’t underneath the car, because its front axle came down and crushed what used to be a 2-ton-rated stand’s base. Not to mention issues I’ve had with jack and stand placement under vehicles that lack sufficient frame strength outside of designated jack points, mostly from getting the vehicle owner’s help lifting the vehicle. It’s to the point where I’ll only ask for help removing jack stands.
The common denominator here isn’t even the jackstands. It’s just as easy to misplace a lift arm as it is to improperly jack a car. The common factor is people who don’t have the knowledge to operate the tools safely. That time with the car rolling off the jackstand was the first time that guy had ever worked on a car. Each time with a misplaced jack has been from the owner lacking familiarity with working on cars.
In summary, working on cars, like anything involving big heavy things that move, can be dangerous. But, with a sense of the risk involved, and the training to use the equipment safely, you can keep all your fingers, as it were. I’m not saying a lift is any kind of do-all-solve-all, or that there’s even any easy way to keep it out of the hands of unsafe operators, just that the danger doesn’t lie in the tools, but their operation.
So I think the question we should be asking isn’t “is that tool safe?” but rather “can we make it so only people who know how to use that tool safely can use it?” And if the answer to that question is “no” then I resoundingly agree with the decision not to acquire a lift. If there’s no way to lock it down for only people who have demonstrated a general sense of competency and regard for safety, it’s better that we don’t have something like that around. I feel the same way about all the dangerous equipment around the space. I want nothing to do with the liability issues the common idiot can bring about.
On that note, some members and I were discussing buying some leg of goat and making video of what some of the tools around the space can do to it. Nothing quite brings a message home like seeing something with the general consistency of human arm get mangled. Of course, this was just some musing over cane-sweetened Dr Peppers, but it is an idea.
In any case, I think, without a lift we are rather limited in what we can teach about cars, and so at least for now, we should focus any efforts on putting together auto classes, on things that can be accomplished with a car on jackstands, since we at least know for sure we can have those.
